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In November 1848, a socialist activist gave a speech at the 13th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. "Mr. Inglis" began his remarks well enough, reported the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who was also there to give a speech that day, "but strangely enough went on in an effort to show that wages slavery is as bad as chattel slavery."

Douglass soon became infuriated with the socialist speaker. "The attempts to place holding property in the soilon the same footing as holding property in man, was most lame and impotent," Douglass declared. "And the wonder is that anyone could listen with patience to such arrant nonsense."

Douglass heard a lot of arrant nonsense from American socialists. That's because, as the historian Carl Guarneri has explained, most antebellum socialists "were hostile or at least indifferent to the abolitionist appeal because they believed that it diverted attention from the serious problems facing northern workers with the onset of industrial capitalism." The true path forward, the socialists said, was the path of anti-capitalism.

But Douglass would have none of that. "To own the soil is no harm in itself," he maintained. "It is right that [man] should own it. It is his duty to possess itand to possess it in that way in which its energies and properties can be made most useful to the human familynow and always."

Douglass favored the set of ideas that came to be known as classical liberalism. He stood for natural rights, racial equality, and economic liberty in a free labor system. At the very heart of his worldview was the principle of self-ownership. "You are a man, and so am I," Douglass told his former master. "In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living." Referring to his first paying job after his escape from bondage, Douglass wrote: "I was now my own mastera tremendous fact." This individualistic, market-oriented definition of liberty put Douglass squarely at odds with the socialist creed.

The abolitionist-turned-socialist John A. Collins offers a telling contrast. In the 1840s, Collins went on a fundraising trip to England on behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He returned home a devotee of the English socialist George Henry Evans.

The "right of individual ownership in the soil and its products," Collins declared, are "the great cause of causes, which makes man practically an enemy to his species." Collins now thought private property was the root of all evil.

He didn't remain much of an abolitionist after that. "At antislavery conventions," the historian John L. Thomas has noted, "Collins took a perfunctory part, scarcely concealing his impatience until the end of the meeting when he could announce that a socialist meeting followed at which the real and vital questions of the day would be discussed."

Perhaps the most significant left-wing attacks on the abolitionists were found in the pages of the socialist journal The Phalanx. "The Abolition Party," complained an unsigned 1843 editorial, "seems to think that nothing else is false in our social organization, and that slavery is the only social evil to be extirpated." In fact, The Phalanx asserted, the "tyranny of capital" is the real problem, because capitalism "reduces [the working class] in time to a condition even worse than that of slaves. Under this system the Hired Laborer is worked to excess, beggared and degraded.The slave at least does not endure these evils, which 'Civilized' society inflicts on its hirelings."

When it came to attacking free labor, the socialists and the slaveholders adopted certain identical positions. For example, the South's leading pro-slavery intellectual, the writer George Fitzhugh, argued that free labor was "worse than slavery" because it meant that the capitalists were free to exploit the workers. The idea that "individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least," Fitzhugh wrote, was nothing but a lie: "It has been justly observed that under this system the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer." As for the pro-market writings of Adam Smith and others, Fitzhugh dismissed them as "every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost."

Douglass, meanwhile, took a page from John Locke's notion of private property emerging when man mixes his labor with the natural world: "Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses," he marvelled, "we are called upon to prove that we are men!"

Having experienced slavery firsthand, Douglass had no doubt that free labor was infinitely superior to it.

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Frederick Douglass Hated Socialism - Reason.com - Reason

Many of us know that Rabi Ray, a contemporary of Biju Patnaik, went on to become the speaker of ninth Lok Sabha in the year 1989. But little is known about his student life and his contribution to socialistic political ideology. As the student union president of Ravenshaw College, he burnt the Union Jack and unfurled the Tricolour in the campus. In 1960, he was one of the founding members of the socialist movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, Aruna Asaf Ali and Ram Manohar Lohia and was the general secretary of the new Socialist Party. He worked incessantly for achieving a casteless, secular, democratic and equity-based society based on the seven revolutions propounded by Dr Lohia, the visionary and philosopher of socialism.

My first interaction with Ray was in 1963, when he asked me to accompany him to a meeting organised to condemn the 1962 Chinese aggression. Lohia addressed the meeting, the reason the venue was jam-packed. Rays equation with Lohia was visible and gave students like me the impetus to work towards achieving Lohias dream under Rays leadership. In 1964, on my return from Allahabad University to Cuttack as a law student, I worked along with him. In 1967, Ray spearheaded the Congress Hatao Abhiyan along with socialist ideologue N K Choudhury, the CM of Odisha from 1950-56. In 1967, Ray got elected to the Lok Sabha and Lohia chose him as leader of Socialist Party in the House. As a parliamentarian, he is credited with using his mother tongue Odia to deliver his maiden speech, which made N Sanjiva Reddy, the then speaker, scramble for references where the provision of using constitutionally-recognised languages for making a speech in Parliament was mentioned.

He joined his other mentor JP by voicing dissent against the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi and was jailed for 19 months. As Janata Party secretary general, he led the 1977 campaign. As health minister under Janata rule, he brought about revolutionary changes. As Speaker in 1989, his rulings on anti-defection law and recommendations against a sitting Supreme Court judge made history. In 1991, he refused to take the speakers post with the BJPs support. After 1996, he bade goodbye to parliamentary politics and formed Lok Abhiyan to tackle the countrys problems till he fell seriously ill. His death has marked the end of an era. With Rays heavenly departure, the light of socialism has been extinguished. May his soul rest in peace, but be engaged to usher in a socialist society wherever it has reached.

Email: smohanty1944@gmail.com

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The light has gone out of socialism - The New Indian Express

One day, President Donald Trump is at a prayer meeting talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger being lousy on TV, and on another, he is naming the brilliant Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor. I will hereby be an unsolicited national hope advisor. Do the second kind of thing much more and wholly eradicate the first kind of thing, Mr. President, and save us from a grave public enemy.

That would be the kind of socialistically inspired future represented by Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. She wanted more freebies but less freedom, more spending, more regulations, a marketplace coerced into failures, identity-group divisiveness, contemptuous elitist supremacy and judicial power usurping democracy along with constitutionalism.

President Barack Obama was also a champ at all of this, and while the public mostly liked him, many did not like what was doing. Thus, after his eight years in office, Democrats had lost a net of 62 seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate, 12 governorships, more than 900 state legislature seats and the presidency, according to a Fox News report. Republicans took charge, and there is now an extraordinary opportunity to reverse a big-government trend threatening to encapsulate us for eons.

The thing is, we may be cheated out of that chance if Trump does not give up on his stupidities and instead provides his enemies the wherewithal to stymie the best in him and turn the country back over to their contrary dreams. If he loves America, therefore, he should please, please quit obnoxious tweeting for starters. It is absurd and makes him look like a misbehaving child with a misused toy.

Then he should quit holding zany press conferences in which he overstates everything, insults everyone and further institutes enmity. He should in fact avoid adlibbing as much as possible. He is a non-linear, now-you-see-it, now-you-dont speaker who treats us to unconnected, unexplained phrases that can mean just about anything and are advantageously interpreted by critics as saying he favors hell over heaven.

Still more advice. He should quit substituting glances at a TV set for actual study. He should quit having reckless phone calls with heads of state. He should quit putting together policy plots with minimal trustworthy advice. He should quit the small-mindedness that puts claims of crowd size above real issues.

Yes, it is absolutely the case that his critics are often far worse than he is. Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Sen. Chuck Schumer? There is nothing polite to say. The reputable press is not so reputable when its commentators, for instance, issue baseless growls about anti-Semitism.

It is also despicable that protestors carry signs referring to Trump as anti-gay when there is absolutely nothing to back them up. It is simple-minded and worse for anyone to insist Trumps criticism of someone who is black is ipso facto racism, and yet we have seen it. In terms of evidence at this point, the Russian collusion theory is right up there with the birther theory. Vandalizing college students should be required to clean up after themselves before packing their bags and going home, and the leakers in the intelligence community should be worried about criminal prosecution.

There is lots of good in Trump, as seen in his executive orders on pipelines and absolutely smothering regulations, his choice for the Supreme Court, most of his Cabinet picks and, as mentioned earlier, his choice of McMaster as a top advisor.

He may very well do something about a crime rise the left uncaringly dismisses as nothing much. Watch for an improved world order. Some of his tax ideas are excellent, if not the one on imports, and we should replace Obamacare with something better, although prudence is needed. The wonders already happening in the economy are signs of how he actually could do splendid things.

But if Trump does not cut out the bad, there are those waiting in the bushes with a ruinous future in mind.

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Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at [emailprotected]. Column courtesy of the Associated Press.

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How Trump could lead us to socialism yet - Xenia Gazette

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Take the socialist economic model. The USSR forced it on the millions living under communist thralldom and confined them to endless poverty.

Stupid Western academics made their pilgrimages and came back brimming with praise having seen only a few cotton-wrapped showcases of the workers paradise.

Eventually, after 70 years and unimaginable sacrifices, it all went very predictably bankrupt under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since their liberation all the satellites have turned to capitalism and prospered.

If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics

Frederick Forsyth

After the end of the British Empire most of the newly independent states chose the fashionable socialist economic model and slithered into bankruptcy with the best of intentions.

Remember the saints Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania? To rounds of applause from Britains academia they led their countries from prosperity to poverty.

Only Singapore, guided by Lee Kuan Yew, went for capitalism and became the richest per capita country in Asia.

Of course academics can always pursue will o the wisp theories. They never do anything practical and never have to bear the consequences of failure.

Our universities are still rife with hard-Left academics preaching poppycock to gullible students. In Africa Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia, was on independence the food bowl of the continent.

Then in 1980 came Mugabe. Today it is bankrupt and hungry, its currency worth no more than toilet paper. In South America Venezuela with its massive oil reserves was the richest country on that continent.

Then came Hugo Chavez, lauded and worshipped by idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn. Now dead he is succeeded by Nicols Maduro. Venezuela is destitute.

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Her people starve, desperate to cross the border each day to Colombia to buy basic foods. Ah, you may say, but that is all far away and nothing to do with us. Not quite.

So obsessed are people by the SNPs lust for an independent Scotland that it is overlooked that the Scottish National Party under Nicola Sturgeon is a hard-Left party and is destroying Scotlands economy.

Scotland exports to England double her exports to the rest of the world combined, never mind the EU. And it is English subsidies to Scotland that keep her from going into receivership.

Recent analysis by economist David Owen revealed that public contentment can only be maintained by Edinburghs lavish expenditure, which since the crash of oil prices the Scottish government cannot afford.

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In 2015-16 state expenditure in Scotland was 12,800 per person as against 11,500 for the UK as a whole.

The trouble is, Scotlands small and shrinking tax base cannot pay for this so the Sassenachs have to step in. Outside the UK but still inside the EU (a miracle that Berlin would immediately reject) Scotland would simply be a North Sea Greece, in permanent need of bailouts.

Which is why Germany would reply: In your dreams. If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics and revert to policies to boost growth.

But so far SNP supporters are content to live off Sassenach largesse and just keep complaining and voting for the SNP, which dominates the landscape. But when we get Brexit sorted it may be wakey-wakey time.

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The favourite torture and execution method of those monsters who control Islamic State seems to be decapitation. Now it appears that IS is being treated to a touch of its own medicine.

Commander after commander is being systematically erased, so fast they cannot be replaced. The instruments of this justice are our weaponised drones, acting on electronically garnered information. Nemesis is now digitised but no less fearsome for that.

The covert truth is that we are listening to every word they say, reading every syllable they write and watching every move they make. Six years ago, when drones were remote and obscure, largely confined to Predators hunting Taliban in Afghanistan with their Hellfire and Brimstone missiles, I was intrigued enough to research the new technology and write a book about them.

I called it The Kill List after discovering there really is such a list of kill-on-sight targets in Washington. Since then these unpiloted death machines have revolutionised warfare. Included in warfare one must include espionage.

The days of the shifty figure scurrying down a faraway alley to meet another shifty figure and collect a package to bring back to the West are gone. Digitisation means that a million documents can be concealed in a memory stick no bigger than a forefinger and brought out in a crevice you do not want mentioned over breakfast.

It need not even leave enemy territory: it can be beamed upwards to the waiting drone. Constant interception and observation mean that the terrorist commander can be found bowling across the desert in his Toyota and vaporised with a missile. But the threat is far from over.

As land ownership becomes impossible for the terror groups they are already converting to assassin gangs and singleton killers who come out of nowhere, uncaring whether they live or die. Most dangerous are those who have never been heard of or suspected, such as the lorry-borne killer in Nice last July who can mow down scores of pedestrians with a truck.

Stanley Baldwin once said: The bomber will always get through. He meant something with wings and engines. The phrase is still true but the bomber now has two legs. That is why we need our counterintelligence teams more than we have ever done and why the whingeing civil-righters are doing us no favours.

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So Parliament has passed the last hurdle to endorsing the white elephant HS2 railway project from London to Birmingham (first stage). It is so far costed at 55.7billion, a figure which no one really believes. With rolling stock and the usual time-and-cost overruns which dog every public project nowadays, it is more likely to come out at 80billion.

No one remotely associated with it will be in office when it runs the first service north and many wont even be alive so they dont care anyway. The oddities surrounding the HS2 continue but with an added new one.

When it was first proposed the onus was all on its speed which would cut hours off the rail time between the capital and the Midlands and finally the North. This has now been admitted to be more like 20 minutes from London to Birmingham city centre. But now no one is mentioning speed.

It is all about capacity. A sure-fire warning about a white elephant is when it starts for one much-trumpeted purpose but then is explained as needed for a completely different one.

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It becomes more and more puzzling that Theresa May will not call a snap election. The polls show she would have a mandate of her own a 100-seat majority in the Commons and a five-year term.

If a my-way Brexit negotiation were included in the manifesto it would be unchallengeable and her diehard enemies would probably be swept by the voters into oblivion. As Franklin Roosevelt observed: we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The trouble with our establishment is that it is riddled with fear. (She could also add Lords reform into the mix to widespread public acclamation!)

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Scots must REJECT socialism to prosper! SNP is destroying economy, rages FREDERICK FORSYTH - Express.co.uk

courtesy Chris Wang

As the election results rolled in, David Duhalde watched on his computer as Americas youth rushed into the arms of socialism.

You could literally track the states Trump was winning by our online sign-ups, said Duhalde, deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its a whole timeline of people saying, Oh no, its all over; Im gonna join DSA.

Founded in 1982, DSA is a national organization that promotes democratic socialism, which Duhalde defines as democracy that extends beyond the polls into workplaces and homes. In practical terms, the group lives on the left edge of the Democratic Party, promoting single-payer health care, strong labor unions and rights for oppressed groups.

Duhalde said the organization now has 17,000 dues-paying members, up from 6,500 in May 2016 and 14,000 on Inauguration Day. The explosive growth shows no signs of abating, he added. The national website lists 105 chapters in 36 states, including 10 in Texas.

DSA campaigned hard for Bernie Sanders during the battle for the Democratic nomination. While some far-left organizations rejected the Bern, claiming the candidate was not a true socialist, DSA embraced Sanders as essentially one of their own. That put the group in a position to reap the harvest of politicized young people no longer afraid of the s-word.

Bernie helped to inoculate against the perception that socialism is un-American or foreign, said Jim Tourtelott, a retired lawyer and founding member of the Austin DSA chapter. Now after the election, people want more than to just say, Fuck Trump; they want a full critique of how we got here.

Since the election, four new chapters have cropped up in Texas, including groups in San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The 3-year-old Austin group is by far the largest, with around 500 members.

On a warm February evening, about half that number packed into Scholz Garten, a dimly lit beer garden near the University of Texas campus that has been a progressive watering hole for decades. Many sat on the ground or stood along the fence as waiters squeezed through the overwhelmingly young crowd with trays of burgers and beers.

Were moving away from being a group of older, white men, said Chau Ngo, co-chair of the Austin DSA. Were seeing a lot of women, and our queer coalition is exploding. Its still mostly white, but were seeing more members of color.

The meeting was a bit disjointed, perhaps because the groups growth is outpacing its organizational structure. The crowd heard from a series of speakers on topics ranging from independent voters to stresses on Austins water supply. They also heard from subcommittees, including the queer coalition.

Nikki Reese, the coalitions 31-year-old co-chair, told the Observer she ran away from her Dallas-area home at 16 when her parents rejected her sexuality a common story for LGBT youth. She joined DSA right after the election.

This is what were all doing to keep breathing, Reese said, gesturing toward the crowd. This is the start of our revolution; people are waking up more and more as Trump does these awful things. Seeing this crowd, I feel more hope now than ever in my adult life.

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Red Dawn: Socialist Group Sees Explosive Growth Ignited by Sanders, Trump - The Texas Observer